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Retailer Circuit City will be launching something new from Microsoft and they will also be the first to bring this new software service called Microsoft Equipt.

By mid-July the consumer software subscription service will be at around 700 US based Circuit City stores and will include MS Office, Windows Live One Care, Messenger, Photo Gallery and other applications.

Microsoft Equipt will cost $70 per year and although this is not a complete move to the subscription model by Microsoft, its still welcomed.

Having bought MS Office in the past I know just how much this can cost and the thought of getting so much included in such a small fee makes this option very desirable.

We are hearing that Equipt will include subscription versions of Student 2007 and Office Home; you will also get easy subscription removal and unlimited e-mail support.

Sadly we have no dates of a similar subscription service to countries outside the United States.

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There were many reasons why Nvidia issued a profit warning and these included a price war in the industry, a delay in new products being launched and weak demand.

The moment Nvidia announced expectations of lower revenues; their stocks plummeted as much as 25 percent. To make matters worse they have also said to expect a charge of around $200 million to cover the costs of defected Nvidia chips.

This charge will cover returns and repairs that have affected some laptop GPUs to overheat and fail. The lower profit has been predicted due to all the different factors and does not look like a long-term problem for Nvidia.

At first the Nvidia chipmaker was expected to make $1 billion in its second-quarter but this figure has now been taken down to around $875 million. Still not bad considering the current market and problems.

Source: Read

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Some people might be wondering why the Samsung Instinct has been so popular to the extent that its sold out in many places and while it lacks many features of the iPhone or iPhone 3G, it is still selling out. There could be a few reasons for this including the simple Sprint pricing plans that all feature unlimited Internet use, a navigation assistance, text/picture/video messaging and Sprint’s online video and music feeds.

This leaves you with one choice to make when choosing a Sprint price plan and that’s how many weekday minutes to buy. You options are $99.99 for unlimited calls, $89.99 for 900 minutes and $69.99 a month gets you 450 minutes. The other reason Sprint’s Samsung Instinct is so popular could be that the iPhone is tied in the United States to just AT&T and if your cannot receive good coverage with them at home or the office, you would look elsewhere.

When we look at the Apple iPhones features then overall they crush the Samsung Instinct, one I will highlight is the lack of being able to add software of your own on the Instinct, you then cannot make the phone anymore intelligent. The iPhone on the other hand can be expanded with many third party applications and this phone will continue to get more intelligent even without the 3G iPhone upgrade.

The Samsung Instinct can be the right phone for you when its entertainment your looking for and not productivity, we all leave in a world where we have a massive love for music and videos, this is another reason the Sprint Instinct shines. When it comes to style, you can be assured that the Sprint Instinct has more flair than a BlackBerry, Palm or Windows Mobile cell phone.

What do you want more from your cell phone, productivity or entertainment?

Source: Read

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When you browse the online world most people keep away from sites that could be hiding nasty surprises in their code but we also know the types of sites that do this and keep away. Although it’s not always that easy as in some rare occasions big companies and brands get their sites hacked and this is when their users become vulnerable.

Today we are hearing that some of the gaming world may have been affected by hackers, PS3 Daily is reporting that the official Sony PS3 site has been hacked and pages on the US Sony PlayStation website have been exploited by an SQL injection vulnerability. The pages affected included those that promoted the games God of War and SingStar Pop.

The original news source was a security firm, Sophos. They said, “malware claims to undertake an antivirus scan and displays a fake message stating that the visitor’s computer has been infected”. Have you been affected by this problem?

PS3 daily summed up by saying “most of the people visiting this website would indeed think that a site of high caliber would never get infected by such hackers, sites like Sony’s have taken harsh precautions to stop hackers ever getting in, now and then it does happen though”.

This was just a rare occasion when a loophole was spotted by hackers and exploited, but Sony has enough money behind it to make sure its websites are properly hardened to prevent hackers from injecting malicious code. What more do you think Sony could do to stop this in the future?

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The Sony PS3 2.40 firmware update is a good step forward for the next-generation games console but many of the features we would want have been left out by Sony is this update, although it’s been said that they are “evaluating opportunities to expand on the new features delivered in 2.40”.

Being able to change the accessory settings is great as it was only a couple of days ago when I was playing Call of Duty 4 and the microphone was set to the Playstation EYE camera, this could not be changed as I was playing a game and now after firmware update 2.40 it can be change just by clicking the PS button. Although you cannot change sound, chat, music and other settings without quitting the game.

While in a game you cannot play videos, music and other media from external hard drives although you can play music from the PS3’s hard drive if this is supporting by the game. Many features that you see in the XMB while playing a game cannot be used and this also includes accessing the Playstation Store. So having them there seems a bit pointless at this time, but as Sony are looking at expanding on these new XMB features we could see more support in future firmware updates.

The biggest feature I feel that’s missed in 2.40 is the ability to voice chat privately while in games, it would have been cool but this is not possible. After moving from the Xbox 360 to the Sony PS3, private chats are the biggest feature I miss.

When you are in a game on your PS3 and click the PS button, you will see the option to invite friends and family to a voice chat has been grayed out, so this is not possible now but the Playstation blog has said, “We are evaluating the opportunity to offer voice chat”. For now you will have to make do with the added feature of private text chats while in games.

What features do you feel have been missed from firmware 2.40 and what would you like to see added to future updates?

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There has been a lot of rumor on what games will support Trophies before today’s PS3 2.40 firmware update and more importantly MGS4 Trophies. At first we heard rumors that the game may have support already built-in and this turned out to not be true and today we found out what’s happening right now for Trophy support with Warhawk and Metal Gear Solid 4.

When will we get MGS4 Trophies? As PS3 Daily puts it “It will happen but it is a matter of when” and that could not be more right, we know that MGS4 is getting Trophies but there is no official word on the release date for a game update. If you have any tips on this then leave them in the comments.

Having just updated my Playstation 3 to firmware 2.40, I love the new features as mention in Peter’s hands-on review, but my Trophies section just says “No Trophies” and like many other gamers I want to play games that support these because we all love to achieve and collect. MGS4 fans will just have to wait to a game update is available.

Warhawk is another story, it currently does not have support in the game version 1.31 and the next version is said to be v1.4 and sadly that will not support Trophies. PS3 Daily reported “The trophy support for Warhawk will not be found in v1.4, sources say that it will be found in the v1.5 patch, as far as we can see neither v1.4 nor v1.5 patch has fixed release dates but hopefully should be pretty soon”.

When you update your PS3 to the latest firmware you will get the trophy feature, but for now you will be limited on what games have support for collecting these and you will not find the massive games like MGS4 or Call of Duty 4 supporting Trophies just yet. We will update you when we get some solid information on dates.

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It’s been long known that Internet Explorer is the most used web browser but it’s also a known fact that it has been losing market share to Firefox for some time now. Today we are hearing that Safari and Firefox have been growing at the expense of Internet Explorer and if you’re a percent person lets give you some figures.

The Safari Web browser has gained market share for two months in a row and now has 6.25 percent of the browser market, although Firefox has a lot more at 19.03 percent at the end of June and this figure has been steadily moving up month on month. Both Apple and Mozilla’s web browsers are taking more market share each month but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still has a dominant 73.01 percent of the market.

While that’s a massive lead for Microsoft it is still one that can be overtaken if it keeps losing surfers to Safari and Firefox. These statistics give you an outlook of the current web browser market but in the whole, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is consistently losing people. The other brands have a long way to go and I am sure Microsoft is not sitting around letting this happen, so anything can happen yet.

What web browser do you use and what features make you choose that browser?

It looks like Firefox 2 is the most secure Web browser, this would be assumed because 83.3% of its users run the most current version and this is compared to 45.2% of Internet users who do not use the latest version of their Internet browser and this will then not be as secure. Do you always update your web browser as soon as an update is available?

Source: Read

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My iPhone will not be the only one that’s been getting text messages explaining Apple will contact me with details of updating soon for the July 11 launch but in the last few moments today, AT&T have revealed the 3G iPhone prices. This new price information may upset some existing AT&T customers.

First of all things look straightforward with the 8GB iPhone 3G costing $199 and 16GB for $399 if customers sign up for a two-year contract, but then you find out that this price is for “new customers and current iPhone owners”. Now what about the many existing AT&T customers that don’t own an iPhone and as such are not eligible for upgrade discounts?

These existing AT&T customers will be charged $399 for the same device that costs $199 to the others; surely this will not make some people happy. The 16GB version will cost these customers $499. Today also saw AT&T reveal voice and data plans.

The contract-free option that many phone buyers use is not yet available for the iPhone 3G, although AT&T said they will be offering this no contract option in the future. The price will be $699 for the 16GB 3G iPhone and $599 for the 8GB version. If you are a current AT&T customer that wants to upgrade to the new iPhone then you will be charged an $18 upgrade fee.

All new customers will pay the standard activation fee; we believe this is around $36. The price plans will be the same as AT&T Nation plans; these include a combination of unlimited data transfer and free minutes. The unlimited plan will cost $129.99 a month and the cheapest plan available costs $69.99 per month for 5,000 night and weekend minutes, and with 450 anytime minutes.

View the full details on Phones Review.

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The Xbox 360 was made before the Sony Playstation 3 and the hardware in the PS3 shows to be better built and this is thanks to being second and learning from the 360’s pitfalls. Now that the new PS3 Trophy system is about to come in the 2.40 firmware update, we would expect Sony to learn from Microsoft’s mistakes and this is just what they have done.

The Xbox 360 achievements had one big problem to start and that was with certain gamers exploiting the system by swapping saves to fly up the leaderboards. The Playstation 3 Trophies will make the PS3 saves not work retroactively and this creates a level playing field making things that much more fun.

If you will be one of the Sony PS3 gamers that become addicted to collecting trophies then you may want to know about a new site we heard about from PS3 Daily, its called PS3 Trophies. Once you get your PS3 system updated to firmware 2.40, you will be able to start gaming with Trophies and you may want to keep track of your goals and share tips with others.

Built for Trophy addicts, PS3Trophies.org will bring you guides, lists and news from the Trophy world. The new gamer reward system that’s introduced tomorrow will also show us a new profile screen, here we will get to see the last 8 trophies you collected, the total number of trophies you have and your level.

There is a lot more to the new Trophy system and the types of Trophies you can get, you can read that here on PS3 Daily.

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TerraCycle is an amazing company that started with the world’s first product where every component was made from garbage. Today TerraCycle has started an Upcycling alliance with brands like Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods and Kellogg’s. They will now build a complete range of products from trash and these will be sold in retailers that include Walgreens and Target.

When you see the first product TerraCycle launched (an earth friendly fertilizer) every bottle is different and that’s because they were made from reused soda bottles. Everything is other people’s garbage, the spray tops are left overs from other companies and even the shipping boxes are other company’s misprints. This is all great but the price has to be good or people will not buy and the amazing fact is it is cheaper than the competition.

Now TerraCycle are Upcycling even more with other products like an umbrella made from discarded Chips Ahoy! Packages and a bag constructed from wrappers of Balance Bar nutrition snacks. TerraCycle has signed deals with some big brands and they will collect some of their packaging that will then be turned into new products.

Another example is with Coca-Cola, the brand has many products made as collectable items and TerraCycle is working with Coca-Cola to make products from old glass bottles, cans, misprinted labels and Coke billboards. This gives the brands a good image that they are helping the environment and also retailers more green products or novelty items. Would you buy TerraCycle products?

You can visit their site here and they also let you sign up to give your used wrappers, boxes and more to the building of new products.

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